ABSTRACT
The epithet “thresher-poet” has followed Stephen Duck from the fields of Wiltshire into the annals of modern criticism. The phrase represents a description, indeed an identification, Duck found difficult to overcome despite a public career that spanned twenty-five years and saw him advance to the position of Rector of Byfleet before his death in 1756. This chapter intends to challenge this narrative of deracination and corrupted authenticity by considering Duck within the transhistorical context of working-class intellectualism posed by this collection. It argues, that key to understanding Duck as a prototype for what, by the 1790s, can be described as the figure of the working-class intellectual. Two significant social-historical forces affecting this eventual shift in meaning of intellectual-as-noun include the rise of coffeehouse culture and the concomitant rise of print culture in the early eighteenth century.
